Jimmy Z on Saturday nights in Sydney, those were the days!
You can really see EDMs rise in the early 2000’s with some of the tracks on that album.
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Power FM Bega - Batemans Bay launched Wednesday 24 September 1997
Again just a couple of ads from the South Coast"s “Southern Star”
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If i recall correctly, that CD had a hidden track from “Eric and Roscoe” (thanks Ray Hadley) too
You’re correct. Per Discogs, it’s the theme from Choice Bro Caravan Park.
Estelle Patterson! Remember her from her 98.1 Power FM days.
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Choice Bro Caravan Park was a staple of the Merrick and Rosso breakfast show in the early 2000s. I’ve uploaded one episode that I found online to my dxnerd86 YT channel. Hard to find any proof of its existence otherwise.
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Wow, I remember this era of Nova (I was a kid) and it really was an exciting brand back then. But there’s a lot going on here that’s interesting to me and I have no memory of:
“Our no-nonsense approach of playing music in stereo” - was stereo FM not normal at this time?
“bored with the constant AM diet” - I remember Nova as being mainly an alternative competitor to 2DayFM and the other big FM commercial stations, not competing at all with anything on the AM band
”Our concept of back-announcing songs and giving you the news, time and weather” - ?? Are Nova saying they invented this?
“A great song regardless of its genre” - Yep the playlist for this era was great and has stayed with me all these years later
I’m also surprised they don’t mention “Never more than two ads in a row” which was a huge innovation that made it much more listenable than other commercial stations.
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So Tim Blackwell was there at the start doing Overnights in Melbourne. He has mentioned working with Hughesy and Kate at Breakfast too.
This was before Drive when Perth launched in 2002 and then did Drive in Sydney in 2004. He did Breakfast in Brisbane with Meshel Laurie from 2009 and then Marty Sheargold joined them. They moved to Drive and went national 15 years ago, where Blackers has been with Kate Ritchie, Joel Creasey and Ricki-Lee Coulter also joining him.
Which brings us to next week when Tim Blackwell and Ricki-Lee wiil be at Breakfast.
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Don’t think, @iris, just Nova…
I’m certain that the text before the “Love, Team Nova” is them taking the piss - also a very Nova trait at the time - and the PS is their “but seriously…”
To me it sounds like they’re aping the usual PR guff that all commercial FM stations have said after they’ve launched, and that what Nova did - and did very well - wasn’t that revolutionary.
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Don’t think, just Nova 
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Ohhh I see. It’s played very straight haha. Completely believable as promo guff especially with the distance of two decades, what threw me is that they really did stand out at the time as being quite different
Especially ‘never more than two ads in a row’. I’d be happy if a radio station went the FAST channel route and limited their ad breaks to no more than two minutes.
What happened to this? I haven’t listened to Nova in a long time. I guess they ditched it at some point? It was such a winner. It made it a commercial station with the listenability of a community station. Ad after ad after ad with no end in sight is really draining on something like Triple M today and it just makes me fuck the whole thing off. I can do 2 ads easy. I guess the business model must have been to charge more for those two ads on the proviso that more people are listening to them?
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There’s profit to be had in having more ads.
Yes, it’s bad and it gives people the sads.
But if you’re a uni grad, you know there’s money in chads.
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IIRC even the first generation of commercial FMs made similar claims to having less ads/clutter. It makes a good headline for an ad to get people interested but the commercial/financial realities eventually happen and things like this are quietly dropped.
Although I vaguely recall that Nova’s switch from the no-more-than-two-ads deal actually got some media attention at the time. So it didn’t go unnoticed.
It’s a real shame, I say this from a distance never having balanced the books at a commercial station but I would think surely it would make business sense to charge much more for two ads, and as a client, to pay more for them, knowing there are many more people listneing
i think that’s what they did i.e. charged a premium for occupying fewer ad spots, but I suppose reality sets in, perhaps advertisers decided it wasn’t worth paying the premium so they went elsewhere where they could spend less? Or maybe Nova just got greedy. Or maybe a bit of both?!?
An early example of “enshittification”
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Can always remember many years ago, with they use to have the radio guide for all stations in Perth in the news paper. How times have changed, most stations these days have 2 shows that are local…. I’m Talking Fm